His new lab freed its scientists from teaching, committee work, and the constant hunt for grants. ![]() Psychologists rejected his results as trivial or not new, but neurophysiologists were interested enough to collaborate on experiments with him. He theorized that the colors derive from complex computations in the brain. Experimenting largely with human subjects who were shown color displays, he sought to explain "color constancy"-why an apple that looked red at noontime also looked red at sunset. But soon after, he spent vast sums to create a non-video, instant-color movie system that people didn't buy, which ended his career at Polaroid.īy then, he was ready to move to his own lab, the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, where he could focus on his quest to explain how color vision worked. Less than 10 years later, he spent hundreds of millions "restating" his industry with the highly successful motorized SX-70 cameras and films that developed in daylight. Black and white followed in 1950, color in 1963. The first instant camera and film-producing sepia pictures in 60 seconds-went on sale in 1948. At once, thinking "Why not?" Land set off on a walk and, in an hour as he recalled, worked out the basics. On vacation in Santa Fe, he photographed his three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and she asked why she couldn't see the picture right away. ![]() It happened because of a dramatic, even romantic, event in 1943. The search for the mechanisms of color vision engaged him from 1955 to the end of his life.Ī prophet of the science-based company so common today, he hit upon an entire new industry: instant photography. He energized and supervised both the U-2 spy plane and its successor satellites, and helped design the mission of NASA. In World War II and again during the Cold War, Land worked on defense problems, most notably reconnaissance. The life that followed the organization of Polaroid was intense and varied, and crammed with honors. Warburg '17 and other Wall Street leaders, the enterprise became Polaroid Corporation. They learned to make reliable, cheap polarizers and sell them for camera filters and sunglasses, and they persuaded investors of the huge potential market for polarizers to control headlight glare and view 3-D movies. They plunged into years of technical agony, mostly in grimy Boston buildings. Then he dropped out again, to found a company with physics instructor George Wheelwright III '25. In 1932, Land became the only undergraduate ever to give a physics department colloquium, and described his polarizer. Returning to Harvard in 1929 to perfect the sheet polarizer, he sufficiently impressed Theodore Lyman, the mandarin of the physics department, that he was given his own lab. Stymied in following a path scientists had trod for 75 years, Land tried the opposite and succeeded. ![]() Studying the history of optics in the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, he did experiments in a succession of basement laboratories and at Columbia University. Entering Harvard in 1926, he left after only a few months to pursue his first great invention, plastic sheet polarizers, in the hope that they would conquer headlight glare. Because big companies had settled into established fields, and small companies couldn't afford "scientific prospecting," young men with ideas had difficulty developing them.Įven as a youth, Land chose not to be stifled. In Land's opinion, colleges were not the only institutions stifling young innovators. "If this is preparation for life," Land asked, "where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?" He said that students had to wait too long to meet the first-rate minds, when they needed to begin direct research at once. ![]() Just three weeks earlier, in a striking speech at MIT, Land had protested a process that stifled students' drive to "greatness," that is, originality. When he received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1957, 25 years after dropping out of the College for the second time, the scientist-innovator Edwin Land '30 was not glowing with approval of undergraduate education. Photograph courtesy of Polaroid Corporation. Land with lens, in a 1943 portrait, surrounded by a "Mondrian" display developed for testing human subjects in his color-vision research.
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